Opportunities

What is an Opportunity?

Simply put, an Opportunity is when one of your Contacts expresses an interest in a product or service you offer.

For example:

• Your Contact talks about a budget amount for an upcoming project they are considering.

• They talk to you about a proposed deadline.

• They ask you detailed questions about the services or products that you offer.

All of these could be considered buying signs, and may indicate your client is interested in becoming a customer. Before that happens though, they are an Opportunity.

Did you know?

Opportunities are tied directly to the deal you are working on. They are related to your Contacts, which means they are usually a Person or a Company.

You can think of an Opportunity as a giant bucket, and absolutely everything you know about your Contact goes into that bucket.

What Does a New Opportunity Look Like?

Daylite Opportunities help gather all kinds of information about your Contact such as:

• Name, address, phone numbers, email addresses

• Details such as birthdays, hobbies, or interests

• The Roles held by People at their Companies

• Tasks, Meetings & Notes that you want to add

• Any email correspondence between you and the Contact

• And so much more

When you create an Opportunity in Daylite, it not only contains all the information relating to the Contact, but it also ties directly into the rest of Daylite, which means it can be accessed anywhere in Daylite you happen to be, at a moments notice.

We will go through each part of a New Opportunity so you understand why it is so important to fill out as many sections as you can.

The Opportunity Name or Title

Try to be as descriptive as possible so you will know at a glance what this Opportunity represents.

Value

The Value is the an estimate based on what is known at this point in time. A high value Opportunity could be considered more important than a low value one.

Probability

This is a measure of how likely the Opportunity is going to be Won. The Probability does not affect the value of the Opportunity.

Forecasted Close Date

Another important factor is the forecasted close date. This represents the date, based on your knowledge & experience which is continually revised, when the client will actually decide to agree to your offer and you win the opportunity.

Details

Be sure to include relevant information to the Opportunity. Be concise.

Category

These are colour coded, and would usually reflect the name of the of the service or product that your business offers.

Keywords

You can assign multiple Keywords to an Opportunity.

Type

When creating an Opportunity you can add a description that will signify where this Opportunity came from, such as online, phone call, trade show, etc.

The State

Opportunities are set to Open when first created. Unlike other areas of Daylite, these drop-down headings cannot be modified.

Start Date

Seting a start date for your Opportunity helps you keep track where an Opportunity is in your Pipeline, and helps establish a healthy follow up schedule.

The Pipeline

Each Project you undertake may have multiple Pipelines, and each Pipeline will have multiple Stages to be accomplished before you can move on.

Delegate to User

Delegation is an important part of seeing the "big picture", and helps take some of the weight off your shoulders. When you delegate an Opportunity to another user, you are still able to see it in their Activity Timeline because you are still the Owner.

Owner

The user that creates an Opportunity is automatically specified as the Owner, but you can change this selection to a different user. As an example, this could be very helpful if an account manager were to leave the company, and you needed to re-assign their accounts to others in the sales department. Once you assign a different user as the Owner, then you will no longer be able to view this Opportunity.

Permission

By setting permissions, you can give specific people or departments access to this Opportunity. For example, your Human Resources department would have full access to employee records, but an employee would have limited access to these same records, if at all. As another example, you might allow an Account Manager to create or add information to Opportunity records, but you may decide not to allow them to delete those same records.

Linked Items

Daylite enables you to connect different contextual items together in a meaningful and productive way. You can tap on the linked Item and it will take to that record. You can link People, Companies, Projects and Opportunities to an Opportunity.

Pro Tip:

As a small business owner, you know more than anybody else how many “hats” you wear in a day. Each of these hats are called Roles, and by defining each Role a linked Contact has in a Company, it helps you to make decisions about who is the best Person to contact when you want to move the Opportunity along.

As an example, the Role of "Decision maker" would indicate that this person has the authority to purchase your product or service. The Person with the Role of "Advocate" is only able to make recommendations to the Decision maker. The Person with the Role of “Executive Assistant” would be able to provide access to the Decision maker.